prefestivities
it doesn't really feel like christmas eve.
this morning my mom, paul and i went to costco. it was crowded as hell, but i would say it was probably only a bit worse than regular saturday traffic. still, regular saturday traffic at costco is pretty hellish, so i was glad we didn't stay too long. we bought diapers, lactaid, bread and a pair of jeans for a boy.
when we got home, cam was just about to get ready for his dad's annual benihana birthday lunch. being that it's at benihana, paul couldn't go, so of course i stayed at home with him. cam left. i chopped potatoes to roast in the oven while paul cooked/trashed the kitchen. i gave him a mini-lecture about scattering dried pasta on the floor. with a pouty face, he picked up the wheat-free penne. one by one. my mom and i just stood there and tried very hard not to laugh. when he was done, i thanked him and as a reward, gave him a paul sticker (i love love love my p-touch) to stick to his little kitchen stepstool. we watched an episode of blue's clues ("joe-car! joe-car! car wash.") and then i put him down for a nap.
i say i put him down like it was easy. of course it wasn't. it involved almost 15 minutes of tears on his part and feigned sleep on mine. when he finally fell asleep, i got up and proceeded to do the pre-christmas toy clean-up of the boy's room. i cleaned off the incrediblock, the ball popper and the leap frog learning table and removed their batteries, then packed them up for storage. i also took out batteries from a few other toys that were lounging in the closet and packed them up, too. then i set the pile outside for cam to put under the house.
cam came home from lunch and went straight to the computer to see, he claimed, if the chargers had been eliminated from the playoffs. paul still slept. i made dairy-free, wheat-free macaroni and cheese because i was starving. i ate that, along with some of the potatoes i had cooked earlier. cam struck me as being gone for a really long time, so i went to the back room and proceeded to needle him for the neglect. then paul woke up, so i let cam handle him while i ate and cleaned up the kitchen.
about 4-ish we went over to cam's parents' house for cake. cam's dad and uncle opened their birthday presents, and then, much to my surprise, started opening christmas presents. if i had any idea we'd be opening presents, i would have brought our camera. i was baffled because we were set to come back tomorrow, so why open presents now? paul opened his -- he got a cute puppy bank with his name on it, signing time vol. 5 and a bunch of thomas accessories (figure 8 expansion pack, a battery-powered thomas and cranky the crane). i tried to play with the crane, which upset paul enough to make him take it from me. cam's dad then revealed he had a fever -- we already knew cam's sister was ailing -- so that essentially put the kibbosh on our plans for the next day. oh well. so cam and i opened our presents. i got two le creuset petite casseroles (pumpkin and yellow pepper) and a mouse rug from cam's sister and a waffle iron from cam's uncle (funny, it never occurred to me that cam's uncle would also be seeing my wishlist). cam got a laser level/stud sensor from his uncle (which freaked me out a little because we also bought him a laser level, but at least it was a different brand) and sledge hammer dvds from his sister. (his parents gave us a card which feels like it contains a giftcard, but we haven't opened it yet.) we had originally planned to leave paul over there for a while so we could work on his kitchen, but the prevailing levels of sick kind of stopped us in our tracks -- so we went home and took paul with us. it was really too dark to do any cutting or anything, so it was just as well.
now we're at home. cam and i ate takeout pasta from our favorite local italian place (we always get an order of rigatoni marinara and an order of fettucini alfredo with mushrooms -- then we mix them together. yummy!) my mom watched paul while we ate -- as usual, he ransacked her kitchen and ate everything in sight. we haven't done a damn thing to the kitchen, but it's a little hard with paul around. cam had me open two gifts (which weren't on my list -- a photo album full of pictures of paul and a copy of alton brown's gear for your kitchen), so i made him open one -- the mr. rogers parenting resource book -- that i bought for him and paul. the two of them are now playing in the living room as i type this.
it really doesn't feel like anything is out of the ordinary. even the opening of gifts didn't seem to mark today as a special day. i don't know. maybe it's because today is saturday? there is something less interesting, i hate to say, about having holidays on weekends. it seems shallow, but i think i feel kind of cheated.